Land Base Aerial Support

Contents

Land Base Aerial Support (abbreviated as LBAS) is a system introduced in the May 2nd-3rd 2016 update along with the Spring 2016 Event, which enables seaplane, carrier-based, and land-based aircraft (but not Autogyro/Liaison Aircraft) to be launched from an air base to assist the fleet during sortie in certain maps.

The prerequisites for unlocking land bases vary from event to event. Typically, admirals will initially gain access to just one base at first, with other bases being unlocked gradually later. In the Spring 2016 and Summer 2016 events, land bases were unlocked progressively one-by-one by clearing certain event maps, to a maximum of three bases. For Fall 2016, all players had by default 2 bases unlocked, the third base was unlocked by clearing a certain map during the event.

World 6 land bases are unlocked through a chain of quests which yield items required to establish bases. Two bases are available for free from these quests, while the third base item can be purchased from the Item Shop. These bases are different from limited-time event bases.

First introduced in Spring 2016 Event, players were able to establish an air base from which support aircraft could be launched. Usable aircraft included carrier-based aircraft and seaplanes, as well as land-based aircraft that are exclusive to this support system.

In certain maps where land base aerial support is available, players may activate the support and assign aircraft to the air base as shown here:

When land base aerial support is active for that map, a mark will be displayed below the sortie button.

At the start of the sortie, players can designate up to two target nodes per airfield where aerial support will be performed. Selecting a single node twice will concentrate aerial support in one location. In order for the node to be clickable, a node must be within a certain range of the land bases. For Spring 2016 Event maps, node ranges are referenced from the starting point of the sortie (or for Map 6-4, the western starting point). This was changed to relative distance from the air base symbol from Summer 2016 Event onwards.

When the player's fleet reaches the node where the aerial support is requested, a land-based air battle will take phase before the carrier-based air battle, the support expedition, and the initial torpedo strikes. This allows them to weaken the enemy fleet and their air power, allowing players to secure air control more easily.

Note: LBAS can destroy abyssals during Air Battle nodes. This can destroy enemy carriers, completely negating their aircraft.

However, starting from Fall 2016 Event, each map that supports LBAS may have a base limitation, which limits how many bases may perform Sortie support on that map. If the number of Sortie support bases exceeds the limit, excess sortie bases will be relegated to standby.

Similar to shipgirls, planes assigned to the air base needs to be resupplied as well.

The refueling process for aircraft is similar to refueling the shipgirls. However, the right box resupplies bauxite instead of ammunition. Use drag and drop to remove a plane from air base slots.

Caution: Removing a plane from an air base will make that plane unavailable for 12 minutes while it isbeing "relocated"

Bauxite natural regen speed would be halved if you set your squadron to this status.[3] (i.e. 1 bauxite regen every 6 minutes instead of 3.) Does not affect those who have more bauxite than the natural regen cap.

Choosing Sortie will allow players to choose nodes for land base support. Choosing Air Defense will skip the choosing node process but will allow interception of enemy air raids, so Air Defense mode should be coupled with high AA aircraft and interceptors stationed at the land base. The remaining options will cause the base to not take any actions during sortie.

All bases that are set to Sortie but not actually sent to perform support are defaulted to Standby.

Note that the cost listed in these tables are the cost for equipping 1 plane, but each slot in your land base can have 4 planes (for reconnaissance planes) or 18 planes (for other planes, since 2016 summer event), so you'd need to multiply the listed cost by 4 or 18 respectively to get the equip cost per slot.

Each aircraft has their own "flight range", which indicates the combat radius of the aircraft. Aircraft that have low flight range will not be able to reach map nodes that are too far away from their air base. See Distance Calculations for details. In most cases, land-based bombers have greater combat radius than carrier-based aircraft.

The aerial battle phases of Land-Base Aerial Support are calculated separately from Opening Airstrike and Support Airstrike expeditions, and aerial conditions from one phase will not be carried over to subsequent phases.

When you change an aircraft that is assigned in the land base, the aircraft that is switched out will be tagged with "配置転換中" to indicate that it is currently being relocated, and it will be unavailable to be reassigned to either a land-base or shipgirls for the duration (12 minutes starting from 2016 Summer Event[6]), do NOT change your aircraft too often.

Each air base slot only has a relatively low number of planes and which is quite susceptible to enemy AA, especially when ships like Light Cruiser Tsu-class are present.

Warning: Swapping an aircraft assigned to the land base will cost you Bauxite depending on which plane you are swapping them into. There is no usage indicator to show the potential loss of Bauxite. Do NOT change your aircraft too often.

Warning: When a land base squadron is sortied, it will cost fuel and some ammo per squad. Again, there is no indicator that this is happening.

In some maps, enemy land bases may assault allied bases with their aircraft. This is triggered semi-randomly, accompanied by a siren sound effect, within the map itself. The amount of raids depends on the map and the route (as well as the difficulty, in the case of Event maps). For instance, in the World 6-5 north route, single enemy raid is guaranteed before reaching the boss, while in the south route the enemy raid occurs randomly on nodes F or I.

Damage to the bases can result in losses of planes (starting from the first slot of the base) and resources. Planes cannot be depleted below 1 by raid damage. It has been demonstrated that bombing damage is unaffected by the damage state of the associated base[7].

To mitigate the effects of enemy raids, players may assign bases to Air Defense in the air base menu prior to sortie. It is advisable to use Land-based fighters (especially those with high Anti Bomber stat) rather than carrier-based fighters, as Land-based fighters are highly effective to intercept enemy airplanes, and it is even possible to annihilate all the attacking airplanes, thus the damage to your bases might be nullified (for the details, see the related subsection in Mechanics).

After an enemy raid, messages will be displayed depending on the amount of damage sustained (see right). The messages are:

空襲により備蓄資源に損害を受けました！

Your resources have sustained losses due to the air-raid!

空襲により備蓄資源に損害を受け、基地航空隊にも地上撃破の損害が発生しました！

Your resources, as well as your land-based air fleets, have sustained losses due to the air-raid!

$ R $is a bonus given if Recon plane(s) exist in the same land base. Carrier-based Recons seem to give a larger bonus.[10] According to current findings, the value of R is dependent on the Recon plane's LoS stat:

For Reconnaissance Seaplanes:

7 LoS or below:$ R = 1.1 $

8 LoS:$ R = 1.13 $

9 LoS or above:$ R = 1.16 $

For Carrier-based Recon Aircraft:

7 LoS or below:$ R = 1.2 $

9 LoS or above:$ R = 1.3 $

Fighter Power Calculation from each individual squadron/fleet are treated separately in their respective round.[2][7]

The air control state is recalculated for every bombing pass, based on the remaining enemy fighters that survived previous bombing passes.

Enemy scout airplanes participate in air fighter power caclulations.

Squadrons can be sent to fleet air raid nodes (single arrow nodes).

Bombers will attack enemies, but it serves little purpose unless they are sunk/destroyed.

Fighter-heavy squadrons can help reduce enemy bombers and decrease damage taken at these nodes.

In the case of a concentrated (2x) attack on a single node only, enemy AA defense will eliminate planes during both passes, but only plane losses from the second pass will be accounted for when returning to base.[7] However, it appears plane ranks are lost in accordance with losses from each pass.

Therefore, it's possible to have planes left in a slot after a sortie, but still lose all ranks on it.

In addition, the bombing damage on the second pass will be calculated ignoring any planes lost during the first pass.[7]

So it is advisable to place your Interceptors with high Anti-bomber stat to slots 2-4, as enemies usually equip fighters in slot 1.

Damage to bases can result in semi-random losses of "reserve supplies," which are better known as the player's bauxite and fuel.[7]

Resource loss from air raids follows the formula 0.9×(total base hp lost)+0.1 rounded off to 1 decimal place. The loss can be either bauxite or fuel (randomly chosen).[5]

If a single base takes 50 or more damage in a single enemy raid, 1~4 planes starting from the first slot will be lost for that base.[7]

For example, taking 30 damage to Base 1 in the first enemy raid and 40 damage to Base 1 in the second enemy raid during the same sortie will not lead to losses of planes.

Bases set to "Retreat" will not suffer losses of planes in the event of taking 50+ damage, but can still incur resource losses.[7]

As aircraft loss starts from the first slot, it is recommended to put fighters instead of other aircraft onto the first slot if fighters are used to minimize bomber or recon plane losses.

If the first slot reaches 1 aircraft left, aircraft will start to deplete from the 2nd slot until it reaches one, and so on and so forth.

The damage "tags" on abyssal installation types will be applied to your air bases when they're sustaining damage. For more information you can refer to this page on the types of damage "tags" that are applicable.

When a land-based attack aircraft has both Dive Bombing and Torpedo stats, the former is used against installations while the latter is used against regular targets.

It has been observed that non-critical damage range (CL0) is different from the regular damage range, or bonus exists.[2]

When Ryuusei Kai or Type 1 Land Attack Aircraft attack enemy ships, torpedo animation is displayed but the damage is close to the usual Dive Bomber range, except when CL1 (critical) happen.[2]

Dive Bomber and Torpedo Bomber follow same calculation, and their damage difference is only determined by individual plane's stats and plane count. After May 5 fix, Type 1 Land Base Attack. Aircraft's damage have been increased and other things are unchanged.[2]

Attack power affected by number of planes remaining in the attacking slot.[2]

Whether you focus your attack onto one node or separate them to different nodes, their attack power won't be affected. (It would only affect the number of time you can get LBAS support in that node.)[2]

When the system was first implemented on May 3rd, 2016, there was a bug that caused the bombing damage from land-base aerial support to be omitted from internal enemy HP damage calculation, which occasionally causes a supposedly sunk enemy unit to be able to act as if they were alive (able to attack/be targeted by your fleet), as shown here

Two days after the system's implementation, an emergency update was deployed to fix the performance of land-base attack aircraft.

The air base featured in the Spring 2016 Event is the Johnston Island Air Force Base (abandoned since 2005) located at Johnston Atoll, while the air base(s) in Spring 2016 Event E-5 are Buin (RXP; abandoned since 1945) or Ballale (RXZ; now Balalae Airport) airfield(s) located in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea and Ballale island, Solomon Islands respectively, near Rabaul and Guadalcanal.

In-game, the island allied bases are located on is named Erehwyna Island, an anagram of Anywhere Island. This is likely a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that range calculations are based off fleet starting points, which can vary even in the maps themselves, implying the island has the magical property of being able to move to wherever the player fleet starts in each map.

After departing Rabaul, Admiral Yamamoto was scheduled to arrival at Ballale Airfield on April 18, 1943 at 11:35 am. His visit was an inspection of the forward airfields and to boost morale, after the loss of the Guadalcanal campaign. Instead, his Type 1 Rikkou Bomber 2656 was shot down over Bougainville.

In Spring 2016 Event, refreshing the game before battle result screen appear can avoid losing aircraft proficiency.[2]

From Summer 2016 Event onwards, the bases are indicated by a cross marker on the event map.

The air base indicator on each map are located in the same location throughout the Summer 2016 Event.

The system was revamped for the Summer 2016 Event after its implementation in the previous event, limiting the air fleet's range to the aircraft with the lowest range.

If Detection fails, LBAS will continue to attack despite being no enemies on the screen. Enemies would be damaged accordingly.[17]

Under some specific, unknown condition, plane lost from LBAS attack (not air defense) are neglected.[18][19]